If people visited my online store all day long and left without buying anything, my immediate concern as a store owner would be “why are there no purchases being made?” My next immediate priority would be to figure out what can be done to influence my visitors to make that purchase. As on online business owner, just spending money to drive traffic is not going to help. In order to see success in a store’s conversion rate, ecommerce players have to understand customers better, reduce friction, improve the layout of their online storeand address the bottlenecks in a visitor’s shopping experience. And this is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) steps in.

One of the best ways to figure out appropriate content, design and marketing strategies for your online business is through A/B testing. You can use controlled tests and sound empirical data to determine which tactics work for your company and your product. A/B testing is a method that is used to compare two versions of web pages or apps against each other to ascertain which one performs better. Basically, it is an experiment wherein a couple of web page variations are shown to a user and statistical information is used to evaluate the better-performing alternative for a set conversion goal.

Why is conversion rate optimization (CRO) becoming one of the fastest growing practices in digital space today? The answer is business growth that can be achieved by doing more with the same resources. CRO, when implemented and executed well, can help increase sales and leads from a website without having to up the number of web visitors. When sales increase, businesses make more money, which in turn reduces the financial burden of having to spend on huge advertising budgets. Businesses then get that extra room to invest more than their competitors and better their market shares.

As organizations are getting ready for the inevitable future – complete digitization of customer-facing organizational systems and using digital analytics to determine customer behaviors and trends – it would be more than safe to assume that digital analytics is the foreseeable necessity that organizations are going to be relying upon to drive better business results.

And what’s more, organizations are not shying away from spending the big bucks on data analytics today. One of the recent articles from Harvard Business Review on ‘Quantifying the Impact of Marketing Analytics’ states that “companies currently spend 6.7% of their marketing budgets on analytics and expect to spend 11.1% over the next three years. As digital analytics is revolutionizing the way we approach business today – it would be worthwhile to understand the digital analytics strategy that organizations are adopting in order to drive positive business outcomes.

According to a recent survey of chief marketing officers (CMOs) by IBM Institute for Business Value, only 13% of global organizations are using advanced analytics to capture customer insight across touch points and only 16% have integrated customer touch points across physical and digital channels. Despite the significant rise in data management and analytics techniques, the number of marketers successfully utilizing digital analytics is very dismal. Digital analytics goes much beyond tracking the website and getting frequent reports about the performance. The large pools of data available to the marketers today hold many golden balls of insights that marketers need to look for, and transform into threads of stories that revolve around their customers.

Modern business decision-making depends largely on data, but inaccurate data can make you lose everything or stall your growth. Today, businesses have to deal with different online and offline channels to gather information on a wide range of issues like market trends, customer behavior, competitors’ strategies, and more. As businesses grow, many new sources of data get added constantly and this data is handled by many different teams and resources. Over a period of time, lack of effective data governance and management results in loss of quality, consistency, and accuracy of the data gathered. And so, businesses end up making decisions that rely on faulty data.

In the algorithmically-nourished business world of today, everything is tied to data. The moment you lose connection with data, your organization is reduced to a strategically incapacitated entity. Add to this, the challenge of satisfying the new breed of knowledgeable customers who are averse to giving you a second chance for any of your shortcomings. Hence, your marketing efforts will fetch impactful outcomes only when they are attuned to what your target audience desires. You need marketing analytics to mind-read customers, take commensurate actions, measure the efficacy of those actions, identify the gaps, and then reenter the ring with vigor after doing necessary rectifications.

As a marketer, are you satisfied with the results of your attention grabbing advertisements, and persuasive content? Has the inclusion of digital media channels in your marketing mix proven effective for your organization? You may rely on data from the digital media to find answers to such questions. The plethora of data available in the digital age may either overwhelm you, or make you complacent.

Well, that could be your biggest marketing blind spot. No doubt, digital media is the most powerful marketing strategy, offering useful data to measure the impact of your tactics against the set goals. However, without a deeper analysis of the data, you may not be able to find the elusive answer to why a certain action did not take place. Software that power the digital channels mostly answer the “what” and not the “why” of that particular issue.

Every year you spend a huge portion of your marketing dollars online in the hope to convey your message with the greatest possible clarity to your audience, and in turn, win their blessings in the form of elevated sales and heightened loyalty. However, this communication and its expected reciprocation would come to naught if you don’t look deeply at the digital footprints of your site visitors. Every day, hundreds of them or maybe thousands land on your digital property and do a myriad of things—search what they need, get converted, articulate their views by leaving comments, or depart in nothing flat.

Whether you are running your business in the real world or the virtual world, how efficiently and granularly you analyze the gigantic troves of information lying at your disposal is now considered as the barometer of your success. But for pure-play ecommerce merchants, this is even more important. One of the top constituents of today’s information overload is natural language text. It can be emails, SMSs, word documents, social media conversations, forum posts, search engine keywords, blogs, and so on. Penetrating deeply into textual data by riding on text mining solutions provides web retailers an excellent understanding of consumers’ sentiments around what they offer. In the end, customer experience sprints from the mundane to marvelous, customer loyalty gets a solid push, and revenues inflate. Are you finding these upshots hard to swallow and think that we are making too much of text mining?